Research Seminars

Research seminars

WYRED Project

Erica Gold, Kate Earnshaw & Sula Ross (University of Huddersfield)

18th april 2018

In this talk, we will be introducing the West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED). WYRED consists of approximately 196 hours of high-quality audio recordings of 180 West Yorkshire (British English) speakers. All participants are male between the ages of 18-30, and are divided evenly (60 per region) across three boroughs within West Yorkshire (Northern England): Bradford, Kirklees, and Wakefield. Speakers participated in four spontaneous speaking tasks. The first two tasks relate to a mock crime where the participant speaks to a police officer (Research Assistant 1) followed by an accomplice (Research Assistant 2). Speakers returned a minimum of a week later at which point they were paired with someone from their borough and recorded having a conversation on any topics they wish. The final task is an experimental task in which speakers are asked to leave a voicemail message related to the fictitious crime from the first recording session. In total, each speaker participated in approximately 1 hour of spontaneous speech recordings. This talk details the design of WYRED, in order to introduce forensic speech science research utilizing this data, and to promote WYRED’s potential application in related research and in forensic speech science casework. In this talk we will also be playing a number of recordings from the database as an example of the type of data that is included in WYRED.